Living in Brighton has been instrumental to my success as a freelance copywriter (thanks to all the brilliant businesses and enterprising digital types), but London has always provided a good percentage of my work.

Now working in London 1-2 days per week

So it became logical to split my time between the two cities. And when I heard about TechHub, I knew there was finally a London coworking space that made sense for a web-focused copywriter like me.

Websites are a complex challenge for many businesses. Before you can make a website better, you have to know where it’s going wrong and what you want it to achieve.

Making sense of web marketing for small businesses

Many of my best clients are small businesses who are not “web natives” or geeks or even – God help them – on Twitter (gasp). Few business owners have the time or resources to make their website as good as it could be. A common question from SMEs is: “Where do we start?” Clients often know that their website is under-performing, or just plain broken, but the question of where to begin often gets in the way of action.

Because of this problem, I got thinking about how to reduce the complexity of web marketing. And the end result was a check list.

Print it out, sit down in front of your website and start ticking! When you’re done, you’ll have a quick view of obvious errors or missing details – things you can easily fix.

The check list doesn’t cover everything, but it’s a good starting point if you know something is wrong with your website but don’t know what it is. Thanks to Emma at Door22 for her excellent document design work.

Free for you to use, change and meddle with

This document is released under a Creative Commons license, so you can use it however you like. You can even slap your own logo on it and call it yours, providing you credit me as the original author. If you’d like help customising it for your own purposes, just ask!

All kinds of writers – journalists, sci-fi authors, poets, creative entrepreneurs and copywriters have gathered for the past nine months to mingle, mooch, booze and schmooze. Meetings were quiet, consisting mainly of friends, acquaintances and people off Twitter. But last month something changed.

Thanks to our new meetup.com profile, created by co-host Al Robertson, our last meeting was throbbing with new members!

Since that lovely evening we’ve had more new members joining the WriteClub London Meetup group, with 20 confirmed attendees and a few more ‘maybes’.

What you can expect from WriteClub London

Many people question their own status as a writer, thinking that to come to WriteClub you need to be a professional writer, or published. But that’s nonsense. We’re a group for all kinds of writers and non-writers, so even if your writing achievements have been limited to intentions or daydreams – you’re very welcome to join us. WriteClub is a very relaxed group, and one of our goals is to create a space for people to think and talk about writing. You may find inspiration or renewed enthusiasm for writing after spending an evening with similarly-minded folk. And of course the conversations are not limited to writing – chat tends to drift off in all kinds of unexpected directions.

We meet in a pub that’s open to the public. You don’t need a ticket and there’s no cost to attend. We don’t do formal introductions or group discussions. We don’t have rules or a format. There’s no big agenda either. The group is here for you, to be whatever you want it to be. See you there!

I was recently interviewed by Writing Magazine – so if you’ve ended up here after seeing me there, hello!

If you’re interested in going freelance (as a copywriter or anything else), I recommend Freelance Advisor as a great place to get ideas. They have an excellent guide to starting out, called Go Freelance (I wrote it!).